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Overview of the Campaigns tool in HubSpot

Last updated: July 30, 2018

What is an inbound campaign?

An inbound campaign is a concentrated effort that aligns all of your marketing channels around a single offer and goal. You can associate a campaign with the following: landing pages, calls-to-action, emails, blog posts (COS only), social messages, keywords, pay-per-click visits, traffic from other sources, and workflows.

Different campaigns might focus on different:

Verticals: target a specific business niche or group of people in an industry.

Product lines: group of related products made by one company.

Demographics: characteristics of a particular population (age, gender, occupation, etc.).

Personas: fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. They serve to help you understand your customers better.

Campaigns are important because they help entice and attract prospects to your offer, and they can help you find the offers most effective at generating traffic, leads, or ultimately customers. Creating a campaign in HubSpot allows you to easily organize and align your marketing channels, making it easier to measure your results. You can run a campaign for a variety of reasons. Some examples include: you're launching a new product, you want to establish expertise on a specific subject, or you're trying to change public opinion on something.

For inspiration and ideas, check out these campaigns that you can run in the Campaigns tool.

How to plan your inbound campaign

You can have different campaigns for different goals and offers. When planning your campaign, follow these steps to create a successful campaign.

Determine your campaign goals. Think about what you are trying to achieve, and then choose a specific goal that is measurable and attainable.

Identify your buyer personas. Campaigns are based on your audience, and identifying your personas can help you determine which channels to use, such as social media, email, etc.

Create an offer, which is the center of the whole campaign. The offer depends on the prospect's stage in the buyer's journey.

Create a conversion path to convert contacts. This is the place where your offer lives. Use landing pages and thank you pages to create the conversion path.

Promote your campaign. Bring people to your offer with inbound marketing using tools such as email, calls-to-action,blogging,social media, paid campaigns, and other sources. By knowing your personas (step 2), you will already understand which marketing method(s) are best to use.

For Professional and Enterprise Only: Nurture contacts. After a prospect has converted into a contact, you can nurture them with a workflow.

Quick tour of the Campaigns tool

From the campaigns dashboard, you can:

View your campaigns and sort by start and end date.

Create a new campaign.

Browse commonly used Campaign recipes.

Search for a campaign.

Filter campaigns by date, by users, and by personas.

Delete or update a campaign.

Click on a campaign to access the details page.

Campaign Details Overview page

When initially creating a campaign you will be brought to the Campaign Overview page. This overview screen is where you will edit and view all content related to your campaign. You can click on Create new under any of the individual sections to begin the campaign wizard, which will take you through creating content for your particular campaign.

After you start building your campaign and using the campaign wizard, you can view your campaign assets with the Campaign Details Overview page where you can see the total number of visits, contacts, and customers each campaign has. Here is a breakdown of what each metric means:

Visits: The total number of visits to content tied to the campaign. This includes landing page visits, keyword visits, and blog post views to name a few.

Contacts: The number of new contacts generated from content associated with the campaign.

Customers: The number of new contacts generated from content associated with the campaign that are now closed as customers.

You will see information is displayed on every channel that you used in the campaign. Click on the any of the individual information (by clicking anywhere within the orange boxes specificed below) to see a breakdown of each element.

Associate your campaign to existing content

If you already published a landing page without a campaign, no worries. You can also associate any existing Landing Pages, Emails, CTAs, etc you have from the Campaigns tool. You can do this by clicking on Associate, checking/unchecking the box next to the content you want to associate, then clicking the blue button to Save.

You can view and compare even more data from your campaigns in the campaigns analytics tool (Marketing Hub Basic, Professional, and Enterprise only).